Marbury: punching thin air

Here's an extract from Obama's interview with CBS's Katie Couric (who surely should have changed her name to Katherine when she made the switch from morning to evening anchor, no?), to be broadcast tonight.

Couric: But talking microcosmically, did the surge, the addition of 30,000 additional troops ... help the situation in Iraq?

Obama: Katie, as … you've asked me three different times, and I have said repeatedly that there is no doubt that our troops helped to reduce violence. There's no doubt.

Couric: But yet you're saying … given what you know now, you still wouldn't support it … so I'm just trying to understand this.

Obama: Because … it's pretty straightforward. By us putting $10 billion to $12 billion a month, $200 billion, that's money that could have gone into Afghanistan. Those additional troops could have gone into Afghanistan. That money also could have been used to shore up a declining economic situation in the United States. That money could have been applied to having a serious energy security plan so that we were reducing our demand on oil, which is helping to fund the insurgents in many countries.

This is just the bit in the middle. Couric, much to her credit, tries her damndest to pin Obama down on the question of whether he thinks the surge worked. But it's like trying to land a punch on Ali in his dancing prime. Obama (sort of) agrees that the surge reduced violence. So, knowing this, would he support it now? A feint, a shimmy, and before you know it he's talking about America's energy policy.

Of course, the only reason he can't just say that the surge worked and that with hindsight, it was a good idea, is that its co-architects were George Bush and John McCain. He would rather risk the appearance of evasiveness than admit that he was wrong and his opponent was right. Which, when you put it like that, is understandable, if not terribly manly.

McCain thinks he has Obama in a headlock here, and he's squeezing hard. But Obama (thin neck, small head) is adept at slipping out of wrestling holds. I think he'll escape this one without injury, because it's an argument about a tactical issue that's already happened, rather than one about the bigger questions of why the war was fought and what to do about it now.

Obama's bold, headlock-slipping move is to pretty much declare the war in Iraq over; he focuses on finding a political solution there whilst discussing the military situation in Afghanistan.

McCain's tragedy is this: the better his surge works (ie, the more stable Iraq becomes) the less important Iraq becomes as an issue in the campaign - and the more difficult it is for him to fight the contest on the ground he feels most comfortable on.